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With all the hype around server virtualization and the impending battle around hypervisors from VMware, XenSource, and Microsoft, I thought this would be a good opportunity to speak out about management of these technologies. There's been lots of buzz in the marketplace around hypervisors and how they will lower server count and make life easier for the enterprise. And while this is true to some extent, it's not the nirvana that vendors claim and end-users hope. By adding yet another management domain into the enterprise, the benefits you get from virtualizing your servers can quickly be over run by the cost and complexity of managing this new environment. Not only that, but server virtualization only solves part of the problem (but this is a topic for another day...). Lately, we've seen a few examples of other vendors rushing to wrap GUIs on top of these various hypervisors (IBM and Symantec are two that come to mind based on recent announcements) in an effort to claim server virtualization management. This isn't helping the problem and in fact, it's making it worse. Customers are looking for ways to reduce costs and complexity—not put more perfume on the pig. We're doing it differently. And we're doing it better. Today, we announced vBlade software, which is a totally different (and did I mention better?) way at managing server virtualization. The approach is to completely integrate hypervisors into data management virtualization seamlessly (under the covers) so customers get all the advantages that a hypervisor brings (server reduction, higher utilization, agility, etc) but in a way that doesn't force the customer to add management skills to their existing staff. This approach is different than any other vendor as we're not just wrapping GUIs on top of Xen or VMware, and we're not asking the customer to learn the intricacies of hypervisor management. Rather, we're giving the user the power to define the size and scale of their computing resources and allowing the power of the Processing Area Network to do the rest. No new management interface, no new skills, no new complexity...just a simple integration of some very cool technology with real customer benefits in a way that is simple and effective.